Engendering Wealth And Well-being

Empowerment For Global Change

Rae Lesser Blumberg, Cathy Rakowski, Irene Tinker, Michael Monteon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813321073
• eBook ISBN: 9780429980435
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The new international division of labor and the imposition of structural adjustment on Third World countries has necessitated a reexamination of development policies and a reevaluation of the role of gender in their success or failure. Although women often bear the heaviest burden under structural adjustment, there is also considerable evidence of women being empowered through their responses to the challenges of economic restructuring. Based on case study material from Eastern Europe, the Islamic nations, Africa, China, and Latin America, this volume explores the significant contributions women make to the wealth and well-being of their families and nations. The contributors argue persuasively that women may hold the key to sustainable development, an increasingly critical issue at a time when policymakers are reconsidering the full costs and benefits of a growth-fixated development model. One of the first to embody the new "gender and development" paradigm, this book reports on research at the frontiers of knowledge and theory about the gendered outcomes of economic transformation, restructuring, and social change. By incorporating "voices from the South," it makes a provocative addition to our understanding of the political economy of development and of the relationship between world ecology and the world economy.

Chapter One
Introduction: Engendering Wealth and Well-Being in an Era of Economic Transformation

Rae Lesser Blumberg

THE DUAL GOALS OF THIS VOLUME ARE TO ANALYZE the gendered nature of economic transformation and to promote the understanding of this phenomenon in a cross-regional perspective, comparing trends in Latin America with developments in other world regions. All the chapters illustrate the ways in which economically empowered women engender wealth and well-being that radiate far beyond their own families.

To establish a historical and conceptual framework for approaching these interrelated issues, this introduction offers a three-part expedition through time, theory, and space. I begin by tracing the quarter century of intertwined gender and economic history since 1970. This period witnessed the rise and evolution of the field of women in development (WID), a great increase in the proportion of income-earning women around the globe, and sweeping changes in the world: its economy, its ecology, its political geography, and its population patterns.

In the second part, I will stress the relationship between women and income and I will argue that women’s control of economic resources, especially income, is the most important predictor of the degree of gender equality. In addition I will also argue that women’s control of income engenders not only their own empowerment but also the creation of wealth and well-being at levels ranging from the micro (family) to the macro (nation). In the third part, I will discusses the evolving field of women/gender and development, which has come to focus less on women’s victimization by development policies and world economic trends and more on women’s rising contributions to the economy and welfare at micro- and macrolevels. A concluding comment projects these topics into the future by identifying gender issues for the next century.□

A Quarter Century of Gender and Global Change

An event-filled quarter century has passed since we began to consider that men and women play different roles in the process of development and are differentially affected by it. In 1970, when Danish economist Ester Boserup published her path-breaking book Woman’s Role in Economic Development, the world was a far different place. The Cold War drove most decisions about which countries would receive international aid, and gender had not yet been imagined as a variable relevant for promoting economic or human development.¹

Two historic “tipping points” took place in 1970. First, in the United States, the proportion of women in the labor force aged eighteen through sixty-four reached—and surpassed—50 percent.² This was a new phenomenon in Western industrial countries, and it coincided with the dramatic rise of a “second wave” women’s movement that went far beyond the suffrage-oriented goals of the first wave and soon spread around the globe.³ Second, multinational corporations (MNCs) overtook nationstates on the U.S. Library of Congress list of the 100 biggest entities in the world, 51 to 49.⁴ With corporations measured in gross sales and countries in gross national product (GNP), this phenomenon was a harbinger of future global restructuring.

Boserup’s book launched women in development (WID) as a new field. She focused on women, technology, population, and agricultural change, and her data indicated that these changes were more likely to marginalize women, whose workloads frequently rose but whose returns and resource bases also often eroded—especially where they previously had enjoyed more economic autonomy. Subsequent studies by WID scholars⁵ and activists showed that women were, indeed, frequently hurt by development but also that women’s productive labor was greater than anyone had suspected or than official statistics measured.

Now, some twenty-five years later, the Fourth World Conference on Women: Action for Equality, Development, and Peace, in Beijing in 1995, has been set in the context of a worldwide women’s movement of substantial size and achievement. The major world axis is now North-South, between developed and developing nations, rather than East-West. Both the proportion of multinational corporations among the world’s largest entities and the proportion of women in the labor force have risen further, functioning as lead indicators for two even more revolutionary developments—global restructuring and women’s growing access to income.

First, with respect to global restructuring, capital, information, production, and even services have burst the bounds of nation-states. Corporations search the globe for the most advantageous place to produce products, or buy inputs, or declare earnings from transactions. Cheap, flexible labor is a key consideration.⁶ Flexible labor means burgeoning informal sectors in most of the world,⁷ rising ranks of temporary contract employees, and an intricate web of subcontracting that extends, for example, from poor Third World women working in their homes to slightly less poor ones working in export-processing zone (EPZ) factories.

Second, the proportion of the world’s women who earn income has risen far faster than the proportion actually counted in labor force statistics, which primarily measure waged workers in the formal sector.⁸ The growing legions of money-earning females are a truly revolutionary phenomenon. In general, regardless of how humble the amount or stressful the conditions under which it is generated, to the extent that women control that income it typically has multiple positive consequences, starting with women’s greater self-esteem and stronger voice in household decision making.

As I have argued elsewhere, women’s control of economic resources, especially income, relative to men is the single most important (although not the only) factor affecting the degree of gender equality at a variety of “nested” levels, ranging from the couple to the state.⁹ A main theme of this book is the impact of the rising share of income under female as opposed to male control, from the microlevel of the household to the macrolevel of the state and even the globe. Increasingly, new evidence shows that women are contributing to the wealth and well-being of both their families and their nations as the transformations in the world economy over the last quarter century have increased the need to earn income to survive and have enhanced women’s ability to generate that income.

Key Economic Trends

One major transformation began with the oil shocks of the 1970s. The price of oil at the wellhead quintupled in the wake of the 1974 oil embargo, then doubled again with the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. Hundreds of billions of new petrodollars flowed toward the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Following extant economic wisdom, the oil-producing countries deposited a large portion of their petrodollars in multinational banks. The banks then lent the funds to Third World countries, including the oil producers . Commodity prices were generally high at the time, but during the early 1980s, prices of oil and other commodities dipped. The result was economic crisis. As their income dropped, many Third World debtor nations were unable to keep up their interest payments.

Under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), those countries that could not keep up with their loan payments adopted neoliberal measures to stabilize their economies, which cut back their public sector budgets and personnel, removed subsidies, floated currencies, adjusted prices, and promoted exports. These “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs) are most prevalent in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, where the 1980s have been described as “the lost decade of development.” African economies shrank almost 3 percent a year in the 1980s, as fast as they had grown in the heady postindependence period of 1965-1973.¹⁰ Now thirty-five of forty-six African countries have implemented SAPs.¹¹

The economic crisis has driven more people into the informal sectors, which are mushrooming in countries around the world. Since the public sector and much of the formal private sector were shedding jobs—and in most of the affected countries there is little or no government “safety net” for the jobless or impoverished—the informal sector proved the best refuge. But jobs in this sector are often precarious for both the self-employed and their even more marginal workers (especially women): except for some of the self-employed, income is usually lower than in the formal sector and fringe benefits are almost nonexistent.

It is not just structural adjustment that is swelling the size of most countries’ informal sectors but also the process of global economic restructuring itself. The rates of technological change and increases in levels of “uncertainty” (situations too volatile and full of unknowns to be able to assess) are accelerating worldwide. In response, both businesses and people have become more mobile. Most countries have had to abandon import-substitution industrialization (ISI), which dominated development policy and practice in the post-World War II period. Under ISI, a small number of privileged firms, sheltered by high tariff barriers, with a tiny, often unionized, relatively well-paid, and overwhelmingly male labor force, produced high-cost local versions of previously imported products.

Instead, lured by the success of the newly industrialized countries (NICs), especially the “four tigers” of Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), or prodded by SAPs, more and more countries have turned to nontraditional exports. Export-processing zones have sprung up in scores of countries beyond the four tigers, although most are concentrated in less than a dozen nations in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In contrast to ISI male labor forces, the workers in the EPZs are predominantly women—especially young, non-unionized women. Often they compete for rarely permanent and frequently tedious jobs. They tend to be better educated and better paid than young women doing similar jobs in domestic-oriented factories in their countries.¹² But by world standards, they are inexpensive and productive enough to attract an ever-growing number of firms. Export-oriented industrialization (EOI) is the latest development gospel for those promoting national income growth.

Women are also more likely to be employed in nontraditional agricultural exports, such as broccoli, spices, and flowers, than in such traditional export crops as bananas, cocoa, and sugar. The nontraditional agricultural export crops tend to be more labor-intensive or require more care in handling than traditional export crops, which is why the industry employs higher proportions of (lower paid) women. These new export crops are burgeoning, stimulated by SAPs and a growing global demand for healthy vegetables, unusual spices, and fresh flowers. It remains to be seen whether either export-oriented industrialization or nontraditional agricultural exports are viable strategies for large numbers of countries.

Meanwhile, the cash economy has penetrated to the most remote locations. Low-resource farmers increasingly sell part of their production out of dire financial need, and this means that millions more women and men enter or expand their involvement in the money economy. Due to the combined effects of the exploding informal sector, the jobs created by the “new international division of labor,” and the spreading cash nexus, uncounted millions of women formerly in the subsistence sector have begun earning or increasing income.□

Income Under Female Versus Male Control

A growing body of research supports the hypotheses of my theory of gender stratification and suggests that increased income under women’s control enhances (1) their self-confidence, (2) their say in household decision making in the areas of fertility, economic decisions (such as buying, selling, or allocating major resources), and domestic decisions (such as the education of sons and daughters), and (3) their sway over other “life options” (such as marriage, divorce, and freedom of movement). Additionally, it is proposed that men spend income differently than women with provider obligations, who tend to hold back less for themselves and devote more to children’s nutrition, health, and education.¹³

Elsewhere, I have argued that women contribute to the wealth of their nations (and families) by two intertwined chains, one based on production and the other on education.¹⁴ In the first chain, women create wealth via their productive activities, especially those that result in income under their own control. Empirical studies now show the much greater share of national wealth created by women’s production than is revealed in traditional analyses of national accounts statistics.¹⁵ Other studies are demonstrating that women are more willing to take on extra work—even to the point of assuming workloads that approach physiological limits—if there is a monetary return they can control. The data indicate that women can approach or equal men’s productivity in economic activities such as low resource farming and informal sector microenterprises even with smaller resource bases. For example, in findings from three studies in Africa, which statistically adjusted women’s resources to equal those of men, women were consistently more productive.¹⁶ An econometric study in Burkina Faso found the most spectacular difference: Women proved to be 600 percent more productive.¹⁷

Women often have greater unmet income needs and typically earn less than men. This means they have both greater incentives to earn money and lower opportunity costs (the value of their time for alternate income-producing uses). Therefore, they may also respond more strongly than men to a modest lowering of production constraints or a small rise in income. This was found, for example, in Jeanne Koopman Henn’s study in Cameroon comparing the labor and income of men and women in two villages—one in which a new road was built connecting it to regional markets and one that remained isolated.¹⁸ In the village with the new road, the women—who already worked over sixty hours per week (double the hours worked by men)—respo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction: Engendering Wealth and Well-Being in an Era of Economic Transformation
• PART ONE AN OVERVIEW OF GENDER AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
• PART TWO ENGENDERING WEALTH, ENGENDERING SURVIVAL
• PART THREE ENGENDERING WELL-BEING
• PART FOUR PATHS TO POWER AND POLICY
• About the Book
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index